by Laurence Hammack | Jun 7, 2017 | Courts/legal issues
LEXINGTON — When social services workers finally removed a 3-year-old girl from her home of squalor and sexual abuse, she was wearing just a diaper, covered in dirt, her hair a matted mess. Nearly 4 at the time, she could speak only two words. One was the name of her...
by Laurence Hammack | Mar 19, 2017 | Miscellaneous (mostly animals)
LEXINGTON — Doug Harwood ambled along a downtown sidewalk, an unfiltered Camel cigarette dangling below his drooping moustache and a stack of his news magazines tucked under one arm, hot off the press. On this blustery afternoon in early March, Harwood delivered...
by Laurence Hammack | Dec 26, 2016 | Politics/government
WARM SPRINGS — Local politics is so heated in Bath County these days that the board of supervisors moved its Dec. 13 meeting to the county’s circuit courtroom to accommodate an overflow crowd, which watched the proceedings in quiet disapproval. Three of...
by Laurence Hammack | Oct 19, 2016 | Miscellaneous (mostly animals)
While not as common as a cat up a tree, a horse in a hayloft can get just as stuck. Case in point: Phoenix, a palomino quarter horse who hoofed it up the stairs to the upper level of his barn in Botetourt County, where he spent Thursday night trapped in the hayloft...
by Laurence Hammack | Aug 14, 2016 | Investigative reporting
Sixteen months before administrators began an internal review that found the Rockbridge Area Department of Social Services turned a blind eye to reports of child abuse and neglect, there were signs something was amiss. In October 2014, an official in the social...